Encountaring DAMIEN HIRST - Essay Example

CONCEPTUAL ART AND DAMIEN HIRST Many people believe conceptual art is the next step in art’s evolution. In surprising and amazing ways it brings ideas and ideologies into art in a way that the more traditional forms never did. In the past, art focused mostly on aesthetics—how beautiful or decorative something could be—but the history of art in the 20th century shows that ideas and concepts began to play a bigger and bigger role.1 A long time ago a beautiful rug might be considered art; these days unless there is an idea or concept behind it, many people might argue with that categorization. A famous painting like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles dAvignon is a good example of a work of art that combines aesthetics with concepts—it is colourful and strange and plays with perspective. But as we see art approaching the millennium, much of the aesthetic aspect of art gets thrown out or made to be very ironic, and the concept behind the piece becomes paramount. In recent years a great deal of conceptual art has been based out of London, England, especially relating to a group of people called the YBAs (Young British Artists).2 This group of artists has been very controversial around the world, but especially in England where they came to prominence in the early 1990s. Almost all of them attended Goldsmiths College in London and were bought in the early stages of their career by the rich collector Charles Saatchi. Tracey Emin is a good example. Her most famous installation piece is called The Bed and takes the form of a double bed around which are many personal objects from her life.3 Another pair of London conceptual artists are the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, who focus a lot of attention on torture and suffering in their work, going so far as to cast life size sculptures based on images from Goya’s Disasters of War. These artists all have in common the desire to shock and sensationalize and tackle subjects that are rarely considered to be art. The critic Matthew Collings had this to say about these London-based conceptual artists: Nobody can quite sum up what they stand for. The advance publicity of Brilliant! presents them as cheeky cockneys and punk rockers oppressed by the Thatcher junta, dodging IRA bombs, living in squats, and making rough and ready art that screams with rage and isnt intended for pristine white gallery space, but for rough and ready warehouse spaces in Londons cockney East End.4 But no conceptual artist has been as controversial as the London artist Damien Hirst, who was born in 1965. In the beginning, while still a student at Goldsmiths, he helped to organize and exhibit art by other London YBAs. He burst onto the scene in 1991 with the famous piece called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.5 This is an installation piece that features a tiger shark floating in an aquarium of formaldehyde. He also recently made headlines by creating a piece called For the Love of God—a human skull covered in expensive diamonds. Both of these pieces and many others have been very controversial. To his fans, Damien Hirst is one of the great artists of the age, coming up with amazing and terrifying pieces of conceptual art, usually on the theme of death. They snap up his artwork, paying huge amounts of money. A recent auction show at Sotheby’s made £111.4m ($199m), according to the Economist.6 Hirst is one of the richest artists in the world. In some ways it makes sense for London conceptual artists to be very rich and famous: London is the capital of global finance. In London, everything is a commodity, and art as much as anything else. While Hirst might be happy to reel in cash, his critics are terribly dismayed not only by the quality of his work but his rush to commercialize it. Robert Hughes, a famous critic says: Hirsts 1991 suspended tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is, Hughes judges, a tacky commodity, even though collector Charles Saatchi sold it for £8m in 2004. It is a clever piece of marketing, but as a piece of art it is absurd, Hughes says. The common defence is that Hirsts work mirrors and subverts modern decadence: Not so. It is decadence, says Hughes.7 A show a few years ago in New York also made critics angry. Many of the paintings in the exhibit were done by assistants, not even by Hirst himself. A critic in the Village Voice said, “Hirsts show merely brings us a step closer to the end of this profligate period. The paintings themselves are transparent; in effect they are only labels, carriers of the Hirst brand. Theyre like Prada or Gucci. You pay more but get the buzz of a brand.”8 Part of the reason for controversy over conceptual art and especially the work of Damien Hirst is that it is all about ideas and ideas are open to many different interpretations. But what makes Hirst more interesting than other similar artists is that he has begun to make his main idea all about the branding and selling of art. He doesn’t try to hide the fact that he uses lots of assistants to make his work and that he has studios that are more like factories, and only signs the work in the end.9 He has changed the way art is done, breaking down the wall between art and business. Mr Hirst may differ from other brandmakers calling themselves artists, such as Gianni Versace, only because fashion houses don’t sell £8m-12m dresses, but the similarities are there. Great efforts have been made to stretch the Hirst brand to reach (nearly) every pocket. Through a company called Other Criteria, Mr Hirst publishes artists’ books. He also makes pyjamas and a line of jeans with Levi’s, which echo the diamond-encrusted skull and cost $4,000 a pair.10 The question is whether this is just too ironic, whether any concept can qualify as conceptual art. That is the question that critics and artist must continue to debate in the years to come. It is both a bold and exciting one which many people have different views on. Some will wonder if there is anything even left of art when they look at Damien Hirst and his work and shout from the mountaintops “Art is Dead!” But if art has proven anything in the last one hundred years, it is that it can always renew itself and come up with great new ideas. Bibliography Cohen, David. “Inside Hirst’s Studio.” Evening Standard. August 30, 2007. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23410356-details/Inside+Damien+Hirst%27s+factory/article.do Cohen, David. “Letter from London: Sensation.” Artnet magazine. Sept 17, 1998. http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/cohen/cohen97-10-24.asp Collings, Matthew . “What makes the YBAs so different and appealing?” Exposure Magazine. March 2007. http://members.lycos.co.uk/exposuremagazine/yba.html Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Conceptual Art.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conceptual-art/ Tate Collection Glossary. “Conceptual Art.” http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=73 Thorpe, Vanessa. “Top Critic Lashes Out at Damien Hirst.” Guardian Newspaper. September 7, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/07/damienhirst.art “Damien Hirst: The Shark’s Last Move.” The Economist. September 11, 2008. http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12202493 “Damien Hirst: The Boy Done Good.” The Economist. September 18, 2008. http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12267585 Usbourne, David. “Critic’s Pan Hirst’s New York Show. Independent. April 8, 2005. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20050408/ai_n14590368 Vogel, Carol. “Swimming with Famous Dead Sharks.” New York Times. October 1, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/arts/design/01voge.html Watson-Smyth, Kate. “Artist’s unmade bed leads Turner Prize shortlist.” The Independent. Oct 20, 1999. Read More